If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, Vincent Bevins and Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade, Jeff Schuhrke were maybe the two most important books that I read this past year. I have read many good books, many well written books, many timely books, but these were arguably the two most important books.
They are important because they attempt to tackle questions that are neglected or only superficially discussed on the political left. They are most important because they surface popular assumptions that are among the greatest obstacles to the success of any authentically left project: spontaneity as an organizational philosophy and anti-Communism as political orthodoxy.
Recommended reviews of both books can be found on Marxism-Leninism Today here and here.
Bevins’ book highlights the failure of impressive mass risings that rocked several countries and their ruling classes in the twenty-first century. He chronicles the objective conditions that inspired people to rise in opposition and in great numbers; he confirms the breadth and depth of the movements that arose; and he demonstrates how the movements fell far short of their goals, even resulting in setbacks.
In the cases Bevins studies, though the movements met with resistance, they melted away far before any final reckoning with that resistance. In his post-mortem-- based on many interviews with leaders, participants, and activists-- he concluded that a strong commitment to spontaneity, a rigid rejection of hierarchies, and a naive concept of participatory democracy hindered moving from demonstrations to successful social change, not to mention, revolutions.
It is this prominence of neo-anarchism or radical democracy-- two ideologies that collapse, in practice, into one-- that doomed the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, and many other promising movements that succeeded in bringing millions into action, but left the stage with little gain.
While Bevins insists that he is only a journalist-- a reporter and interpreter of findings-- he strongly suggests that structure and leadership were the missing elements from mass struggles of this century. One cannot help but sense that he has something akin to a Leninist organizational model in mind, without an explicit endorsement. And why not? After all, weren’t highly organized, vision-driven, often worker-led parties the most formidable, the most successful movements for change, for revolution in the last century?
Today’s tragedy is that a handful of sentences describing a grievous injustice on social media can bring mighty masses to the streets, but the reigning simplistic ideology of spontaneous, undirected, unfocussed action will go no further. Political demonstrations become exercises in mass therapy-- “performances” of democracy-- rather than goal-directed measures in a larger political program of change.
Of course, these same “spontaneous” risings are also easily hijacked by other political operators with a wholly different agenda, like the infamous color revolutions that have reshaped Eastern Europe and other places in the interest of imperialism. Where there are no organic leaders, where there is no master plan, leaders and direction will likely be supplied from somewhere else.
The student movements of the 1960s codified the idea of participatory democracy-- a decision-making approach that sought to engage everyone equally, renounced the idea of authority, and scorned traditional roles of leadership. But the world is not a college seminar room. Millions of workers and peasants have-- in the past-- deferred the role of leadership to those who have earned it from their dedication and sacrifices. They understood that a revolution itself is the most democratic act of all, breaking the bonds of domination and exploitation and opening the gates to popular rule.
The overarching focus on democratic procedure-- an obsession of the privileged left-- too often dilutes the commitment to outcomes. The final lap of social change is the replacement of one system with another, the overthrow of one ruling order with another. If, as anarchists and liberals maintain, the democratic procedure is everything, then there is no need to prefigure an outcome. Instead, we can take it on faith that masses-as-a-whole will spontaneously choose the outcome that is best in some imagined, country-wide utopian townhall meeting of the future.
Unfortunately, history gives us no example of great social change secured by consensus. Nor has a parliament ever handed working people a victory without the pressure of mass militancy.
Behind the left cult of bourgeois democracy is a deeply ingrained anti-Communism. At the height of the Cold War, Communism, socialism, and even popular frontism came under vigorous attack throughout the capitalist countries and especially in the US. Association with progressive ideas advocated by Communists or the center-left popular front (including the New Deal) risked social isolation, job loss, even jail. Unless accompanied by a conspicuous disclaimer condemning Communism, progressive ideas such as labor rights, social equality, anti-racism, or even mild criticism of capitalism, were cause for ostracization. Few had the integrity to risk the consequences of the Cold War inquisition. Instead, even the most tepid reformism necessarily had to be presented with the tag “democratic” or “free” (to separate itself from Communism), as in “democratic socialism,” “democratic planning,” or “free trade unionism.”
As the worst of the inquisition resided, a “new left” was born that consistently paid homage to the official doctrine of anti-Communism. To the new generation of activists, the problem was not that the capitalist countries needed a radical, even revolutionary makeover, but that they needed their flawed democracies to be reformed, to be more “democratic.” Yes, the institutions were imperfect-- infected with racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, elitism, prejudices of all kinds, militarism, or corruption-- but they were sound and could be fixed with an injection of democracy.
Fear of redbaiting-- dread of violating the secular religion of anti-Communism-- closed the door to the kind of really radical answers that working people had sought since the dawn of the industrial age.
Which brings us to Jeff Schurhke’s important book, Blue Collar Empire.
If the hope of a radically more just, more egalitarian, more humane society lies in the hands of the working class-- and I think it does-- then it cannot be shackled by the dogma of anti-Communism. Yet Schurhke shows that our organized US labor movement-- the AFL-CIO-- has been thoroughly infected with this disease-- a disease that incubated in the business unionism of Samuel Gompers, the American Federation’s founder, spread throughout the years of AFL craft unionism, and killed the promising spark of class-struggle unionism generated by the nascent CIO.
We learn from Schurhke of the Cold War betrayal of global workers’ solidarity culminating in US labor’s sabotage of The World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). We are told of the undermining of Communist and left-led unions throughout the world and the disasters that befell foreign workers as a result.
Anti-Communism wedded the AFL-CIO to the CIA stooges Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, and served as a litmus test for leadership, even participation in the AFL-CIO, effectively vetting the most militant, class-conscious organizers. Through the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), the AFL-CIO collaborated with only the most backward, US-friendly, anti-Communist international union leaders, spreading US dollars to deny workers the right to choose their own way forward.
Schurhke provides us with the most comprehensive account of the insidious AFL-CIO/CIA cooperation since George Morris’s long-out-of-print classic, CIA and American Labor (1967), a book that unfortunately received more attention from the CIA than from most of his contemporary labor historians.
Genuflecting to anti-Communism and mechanically disdaining organizational principles will inevitably cripple left movements today, as they have so often in the past.
For Bevins and Schurhke in their own words, interviews are available from Coming From Left Field: Bevins, Schurhke.
The authors underscore the obstacles to moving beyond the ugly choices currently available, as we enter a new and foreboding year.
Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com
